Abdullah Ocalan

Abdullah Ocalan (4 April 1948-) was one of the founders of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) militant organization in Turkish Kurdistan in 1978. Twenty years later, e was arrested by Turkey's intelligence agency MIT with assistance from the United States' CIA, and he was the sole prisoner on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara. Ocalan later stated that the only solution to the question of Kurdistan's independence would be peaceful politics and not an armed struggle.

Biography
Abdullah Ocalan was born on 4 April 1948 in Omerli, Sanliurfa Province, Turkey to a Kurdish father and an ethnic Turkish mother. Ocalan was raised speaking Turkish, and he would think and give orders in Turkish, even while he was fighting against the Turkish government. Ocalan studied political science at Ankara University before co-founding the Kurdistan Workers' Party in 1978 during the struggles between the left-wing and right-wing factions of Turkish politics, and in 1984 the PKK began armed struggle against the government. He lived in Russia, Italy, and Greece during the rebellion, and in 1998 he was captured by Turkey's MIT and the United States' CIA in Nairobi, Kenya while heading from the Greek embassy to the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. From 1999 to 2009, he was held in solitary confinement on the island of Imrali in the Sea of Marmara with 1,000 Turkish Army guards, and he renounced armed struggle while he was in prison, instead advocating a political solution.